'What Maisie Knew' Moves a Tale of Divorce to Present-Day New York City

The novels of Henry James, with their lengthy interior monologues and unreliable narrators, would seem to be prohibitively challenging to transform into movies. James himself attempted to adapt some of his writing for the theater in the late 1800s, but failed miserably.

"He knew he would have to somehow cheapen [his stories], or simplify them," says Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith College and author of the recent "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American...